Preparing a 2010 MacBook For Donation

I finally managed to instal High Sierra on the old MacBook by using the tools found here:

Mist

Previous installers that I downloaded all failed, including the one downloaded by:

macOS High Sierra Patcher

And one that I downloaded in 2018 when I had to reinstall High Sierra on the old MacBook after I replaced the internal spinner with an SSD. It worked in 2018. It didn't work now.

Note that all the downloading and boot installer creating was done on a 2019 Intel iMac running Sonoma.

I never did manage to install High Sierra on the old MacBook. I did install Ubuntu, which was quick and easy.

One thing I discovered was the every High Sierra installer I could find, including one that I had downloaded from the App Store in 2018, had two bugs:

• The installer fails with the user message that the installer is damaged. The installer log says: "The quartz framework's library couldn't be loaded from /System/Library/Frameworks/Quartz.framework/Versions/A/Quartz"

But, there is no such directory.

The only subdirectory in /System/Library/Frameworks/Quartz.framework/Versions/A/ is Frameworks. There is no subdirectory called Quartz.

• At the beginning of an installation the installer calls a function to determine if the target drive can be converted to APFS. Whoever wrote that function failed to consider the case where the target drive is already APFS. This causes the install to fail.

Yes, I did reformat the internal drive as HFS+. I couldn't get Disk Utility to do it, so I did it from the command line.

I live in Northeast Thailand. My sister-in-law works at a university that is very happy to get old gear for students to work on. I wanted to give them a bootable machine. I had no idea it would be so difficult. I have no idea where I'd take it to be recycled. The closest Apple Store is in Bangkok, about 250K from where I live.

I was keeping that old beast at a condo I own on and visit just one week a month. I mainly used it to log in to a bunch of remote Raspberry Pies via ssh. For that purpose, it was great. But, the screen was starting to fail, so I replaced it with an M1 MBA.

BTW, I upgraded the old MacBook with a new battery, 8GB RAM and a nice fast SSD. It actually performed quite well for such an ancient machine.

What happened to your post on the High Sierra Installer Patcher?

Anyway, I tried to use it, but it failed with many errors like this:

cp: /Users/mnewman/Downloads/macOS High Sierra Patcher.app/Contents/Resources/UtilitiesLauncher.app/Contents/Resources/Base.lproj: unable to copy extended attributes to /Volumes/Untitled/Applications/Utilities/Contents/Resources/Base.lproj: No such file or directory
cp: /Volumes/Untitled/Applications/Utilities/Contents/Resources/Base.lproj/MainMenu.nib: No such file or directory
cp: /Volumes/Untitled/Applications/Utilities/Contents/Info.plist: No such file or directory
cp: /Volumes/Untitled/Applications/Utilities/Contents/PkgInfo: No such file or directory
cp: directory /Volumes/Untitled/System/Library/LaunchDaemons does not exist
"disk11" ejected.

I tried it with three known good drives (two spinning drives and one SSD), but it failed the same way every time.

Surprised me as well. All it offers are APFS variations. Easy enough to do from the command line, though.

I only have two installers left; one from Mist and one that I downloaded in 2018.

Using du -hc, they are both 4.9G.

Both were downloaded using a 2019 Intel iMac running Sonoma.

I still don't understand why the installer that worked in 2018 doesn't work now. I guess that will remain a mystery.